Official Word from Google, on China....

... is here, on the Official Google Blog. They have stopped the filtering. Links to Google.Cn have now been redirected to Google's Chinese-language Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk. (As part of the "one country, many systems" approach, Hong Kong is part of the People's Republic but operates under separate rules in many ways. Inside-baseball: on the Hong Kong site, Google will offer uncensored results both in the simplified Chinese characters typically used in the mainland and the traditional Chinese characters typically used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.) An hour ago I was able to reach and search on Google.cn. Now that's gone. Thanks to reader ML for an early heads-up about the redirection to Hong Kong, my first indication that things had really changed.

More later on the implications, including Google's announced hope to continue a range of other activities in China while discontinuing its mainland-based search activities. This is just confirmation that, as mentioned a little while ago, the other shoe has now dropped.

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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.